FORT STEWART - With two combat tours under his belt, and another fast approaching, Sgt. Steve Butcher gets asked a lot of questions about Iraq.

Butcher's 6-year-old daughter, Molly, started asking about the war when he returned from his second deployment a year ago.

Do men use guns?

Yes.

Do people get killed?

Yes.

"Daddy, that's stupid," she told him.

New recruits in Butcher's infantry unit have questions as well.

Why are U.S. troops still in Iraq?

Should they be going back?

Butcher, 27, says nothing that he has heard from his little girl or from his brothers in arms has shaken his resolve as he prepares to leave for a third tour in Iraq next month. He sees the war in terms of simple economics: time, money and effort spent by terrorists fighting American forces in Iraq leaves them with fewer resources to plot another terror attack similar to Sept. 11 back home.

"That's really all the justification I need," says Butcher, an infantry squad leader from Rochester, N.Y. "I don't really worry about the politics of it. I can't do anything about that anyway."

While U.S. policy-makers weigh bleak assessments of Iraq's future and Americans question the war's slow progress, the 3rd Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart continues to prepare for its January deployment.

Most troops expected after returning from their second rotation that they would have to go back to Iraq, said Lt. Paul Fleming, a platoon leader in the 1st Brigade. They know the cycle likely will continue, he said, until the fledgling Iraqi military can defend the Middle Eastern nation on its own.

"They see the big picture," said Fleming, 26, of Killeen, Texas. "They know when these guys can take control themselves, we don't have to go over there anymore."

With its latest deployment orders, the 3rd Infantry has been called to duty in Iraq more than any division in the Army. Its tanks and armored Bradley vehicles were among the first to rumble into Baghdad in the 2003 invasion.

The troops at Fort Stewart either have been at war or have been training for it ever since. They deployed a second time in 2005 as Iraq elected its first democratic government. Now, a year after soldiers came home to their families, they'll be saying goodbye again.

That's not what Staff Sgt. Julius Moton expected after he deployed with the 3rd ID to topple Saddam Hussein's regime nearly four years ago. He'll be among the first wave of more than 4,000 troops with the division's 1st Brigade to depart next month.

"I thought that was it," said Moton, 27, of Cleveland, recalling the end of his first tour. "Now this time, it's almost less than a year from the last time. It's pretty stressful."

Except for taking leave time with family for Thanksgiving and Christmas, Fort Stewart troops have been prepping armored Humvees and Bradleys and packing gear into cargo containers to be shipped to the Persian Gulf.

The 1st Brigade finished its combat training in October during intensive mock-combat scenarios with instructors sent to Fort Stewart from the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif.

After two tours, most 3rd Infantry troops already have real combat experience. The division commander, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, estimates about 60 percent of his soldiers have served at least one tour in Iraq.

"It used to be you'd walk into a formation and see one or two guys wearing a combat patch, and those were Vietnam veterans," Lynch said. "Now you see almost no one who doesn't have that right-shoulder patch."

That experience has come at price - 147 soldiers from the 3rd ID died in its first two deployments to Iraq, more than two-thirds of them during the division's second tour.

Having served in Iraq twice already with the 3rd Infantry Division, Staff Sgt. Robert Dove knows the stakes. Framed photographs of eight soldiers killed in 2005 from his unit - the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment - hang on the wall outside the office of Dove's battalion commander.

With violence between religious sects pushing Iraq toward civil war and President Bush rethinking U.S. strategy after a bipartisan commission reported "grave and deteriorating" conditions, Dove insists the war isn't a lost cause.

Dove recalled arriving in the city of Samarra last year shortly after elections took place for Iraq's preliminary government. Turnout had been poor because residents feared violence at the polls.

"In some places, they had to send voters to other sectors of the city because they ran out of ballots," said Dove, 28, of Blacksburg, Va. "There's progress being made. You saw the transition there in the city from when we first went in to the end."

When Butcher's young daughter told him last year she believes war is stupid, the sergeant told her she was right. But sometimes, he said, good guys have to fight bad guys to bring about peace.

Butcher plans to spend time with his daughter - who recently moved to Las Vegas with his ex-wife - over the Christmas holidays before returning to Fort Stewart and, soon after, another year at war.

Having done it twice already with the rest of the 3rd ID, Butcher said he still feels obligated to finish the job in Iraq and do it right.

"Were they to just give up, it would've been a complete waste of a lot of time, effort and people's lives - and three years of mine," he said. "Whether we should've gone or not is irrelevant at this point. There's no other honorable thing to do except to finish it out."